The present invention relates to digital photo books and more particularly for creating and managing digital photo books that are adapted and optimized for touch enabled client devices with limited storage capability.
Common place photo book compilation software that exists in the art is ill-suited for today's mobile computing devices such as tablet and smart phones. Conventionally, in order to compile the digital photo book that can be sent to a print provider to create physical photo book, a user needs to download or copy the high resolution photos from a remote site or mobile device into his/her local hard drive to use a desktop photo book creation application, or upload these images to a web server for using a web based photo book creation application. After transmitting the photos to the photo book application, the photos along with other information associated with the photos are fed into the photo book compilation software to generate the photo book. The prior art software is not ideally suited for today's mobile computing devices for several reasons, such as, 1) limited local storage capacity that these modern devices come with, 2) sub-optimal user interaction input mechanism. Firstly, current mobile computing devices have limited storage; it is not ideal to download every high-resolution photo locally to use the software. Secondly, the standard interface for the conventional software is via peripheral input hardware like mouse and keyboard. In today's mobile computing devices, the touch screen is the de facto standard. Hence, it is not convenient to use conventional photo book software, which is ideal for conventional Personal Computing devices, and not on modern touch screen-enabled mobile computing devices. Due to these reasons, there is a need in the art for a photo book compilation software (or system) that is adapted and optimized for modern mobile touch enabled computing devices and that leverages hybrid storage of both mobile device local storage and cloud based storage.